Pavel Černoch

In Leoš Janáček’s opera, Katya Kabanová, the eponymous heroine is ensnared at the heart of an ominous mesh of relations. Her domineering mother-in-law, Kabanicha, oppresses and controls her son Tichon, whose marriage to Katya suffers massively from heteronomy. Because Katya finds no fulfilment in this family, she flees and fulfils her unsatisfied erotic desires in an affair with Boris. As composer and librettist, Janáček bundles the plot of the literary template, Alexander N. Ostrovsky’s drama, The Storm. The libretto largely dispenses with the portrayal of the external social circumstances, from whence Katya’s essence and choices are decisively determined. Instead, Janáček traces the development of the title character in a psychological-sensitive musical language. Katya’s feelings of guilt increase continuously until they discharge into a public confession as an emotional storm. The turbulent and in places fanciful music opens the space for passages of lyrical grace and allows us to experience the essence of the characters. In Katya, director Krzysztof Warlikowski sees an outsider, who is denied a life in harmony with her desires, and at the end prefers death over lies. The destructive power of religion behind it all is not only found in a small Russian town on the banks of the Volga in the 1860s, where the libretto places the plot, but rather can also be seen everywhere all over the world.

New Music Director of The Royal Opera Jakub Hrůša leads the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House in a rich programme of Czech and Hungarian music. From the hallucinatory orchestral colours of Béla Bartók’s scandalous Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin, to Antonín Dvořák’s rarely-heard cantata for soloists and chorus, The Spectre’s Bride, an evening of extraordinary musical storytelling awaits. Don’t miss this chance to see the Orchestra and Chorus of the Royal Opera House centre stage in a thrilling programme of concert works.

Rusalka feels trapped in a world from which there is no escape. She is ready to put her immortality on the line in return for a human soul, so she can gain the love of a handsome prince. But she must pay for it with her voice. Muted and liberated from her dark world, she is forced to watch as the prince rejects her in favor of a foreign princess – dooming them both. She cannot live, she cannot die, yet nevertheless at the end, she helps the prince find his death with a “rescuing” kiss.